Something that happens when you join a writing community and start interacting with other writers regularly is that you, inevitably, start to draw comparisons between their work and yours…or their manner of working or habits and your own.
This is especially prevalent around November when the NaNoWriMo crowd start talking about their word counts and their daily word count goals. Those who look at others who can bang out 5k words in a day and wonder how that is even humanly possible start to feel really discouraged, and I hear a lot of people expressing disappointment in themselves.
Quantity and Quality often have an inverse relationship predicated on how much TIME is invested.
Let me tell you about graphic design. As a professional in the field, new hires would turn up in the office and their portfolios would be amazing! I would look at their stunningly detailed illustrations and be so jealous and feel like an utter hack. I would be in awe of these younger designers who often had the design degree that I lacked and much more polished portfolios.
But then these new hires would sit with me for training and I'd find out things about them that made me feel a lot better. Sometimes they would barely know how to operate Adobe Creative Suite products. They often had no idea how to conduct themselves in a business setting or around clients. They’d have no clue about how to manage client expectations and fulfill a brief, and some even showed a stunning lack of fundamental knowledge about color and creating balanced visuals.
How could these individuals look so good on paper, but be such a disaster in practice?
Often, the secret ingredient was time.
Just looking at a finished piece, you have no concept of how long someone has worked on it. As students, these artists could have spent entire semesters honing that one portfolio piece, workshopping it with their peers and getting the professional advice of their mentors and professors on how to improve it. Or perhaps they'd executed the idea years before and gone back to polish it multiple times before including it in their portfolio.
The famous “rhetoric triangle” adapted for design. Illustration by Betsey Talbot.
But “in production" clients are rarely, if ever, going to pay for the kind of time that a high level of quality requires.
Realistically, designers don't get unlimited hours to invest on executing a brief. In my experience, the client wants things out the door quickly, under budget. The result is often a design that is “good enough”.
As a professional designer, you may not be producing work that takes advantage of everything you’re capable of offering, but your work is solid, your clients are happy, and you're not embarrassed of what you’re putting out into the world…
…until you put your work right next to something someone spent the better part of a year producing…
Then your “quick and dirty” ad campaign looks sub-par in comparison.
Comparison is the thief of joy…and confidence!
So maybe those other writers you keep comparing yourself to who are cranking out 5k words a day are working on book five of a series, so all the heavy lifting of world creation, characterization, and research is done. Maybe they're writing pulp fiction that follows a well established formula that smooths the path for them. Maybe their first drafts are an absolute train wreck.
“Your work may be something with rare depth and originality that just doesn’t spill onto the page and flow like water, but rather oozes up from your depths like crude oil and requires a long process to refine into something precious.”
It's possible that their work is very different to yours. Their work may be plain and derivative whereas you're working on something with rare depth and originality that just doesn't spill onto the page and flow like water, but rather oozes up from your depths like crude oil and requires a long process to refine it into something marketable.
But it’s worth investing the time because what you are left with at the the end of your process, however slow it may be, is something precious and valuable, not something common that can be found almost anywhere.
Trust your process. Respect your pace.
All this is a lot of words simply to say: You do you. Comparing your work with someone else’s is the source of so much suffering. Just because you prefer to edit as you go, or write in quick jolts of inspiration instead of sitting down at 5am every day and putting in a solid two hour block of writing time before letting the distractions of the day get to you doesn’t mean you’re doing it “wrong”. Your process is unique to you. The advice that someone else gives may not empower you to achieve similar results. It may, in fact, disempower you by making you feel self-conscious about the volume of your output.
By all means, try every piece of advice you’re given. Something may really work for you and help you improve your writing routine and the quality of your output. But if a technique or practice doesn’t work for you even though everyone else raves about it being the right thing to do™️, don’t fret about it. Your results may vary. You’re not wrong for doing things the “wrong way”. If it’s working for you, don’t let anyone else discourage you from persevering.
